It’s largely inspired by the work of Ray Ryan at Google on the GWT Wave client and his presentation at Google IO 2009 titled Best Practices for Architecting GWT App.
I’d say that watching this video is the first step to understanding Swing On Steroids.

It’s been used in production apps for about a year now with success : it’s modular, refactorable and work for small or big applications.

Among some enchancements, this release is the first one where non-ui related code (threading, forking, messagebus etc…) is available in a separate jar.

At this time the documentation is really poor. I hope to find time to write some.
If you’re interested, read about the patterns mentionned above and then dig into the code. If you understand the patterns it won’t be hard to understand and get started.

As a bonus, a versatile wizard api using the same patterns, a graph model and commodities such as BlockingView easing in and out smoothly thanks to Trident is provided.

Qi4j community migrated away from Maven after several years of frustration, especially around release management, versioning and cross-module dependency resolution issues, in Feb 2011. The tool of choice is now Gradle.

What ?

The case study I want to describe today is quite simple. I’m writing an application using Qi4j, it’s build is maven based. As I am contributing to Qi4j alongside the development of my own application I’m using the development branch of Qi4j most of the time. In maven terms it means my application depends on the last version SNAPSHOT. I want to continue working this way so I’ll describe here how to use the Qi4j build system for this use case.

In other words, you’ll learn how to manage the Qi4j build system for developing Qi4j and use it in maven projects.

What not ?

I will not talk about IDE support here, only build systems, namely maven and gradle.

Making it work

The main goal is to find gradle commands for different aims and make their run as short as possible.

I used the same computer for all time mesures present in this post, a Samsung netbook N150 with 2GB RAM and a Vetrex II solid state drive from OCZ.

Commands described here last from 45 minutes to 5 minutes for building and installing the whole Qi4j ecosystem in the local maven repository. When dealing with single modules all this gets very quick. For example org.qi4j.core.api can run in 20 seconds when skipping tests and javadoc.

Here are some example gradle commands. I use the gradle daemon to get rid of the startup time.

$ gradle install -Dversion=1.3.0-SNAPSHOT

This one takes forever, it will buid and install locally all artifacts (main, -sources, -javadoc),run tests and then generate the qi4j-sdk distribution archives. Took my netbook ~40 minutes.